The system drive controller is an important part of system performance. In most modern boards your drive controller will run off of the PCI-e bus. The PCI-e bus performance can be affected by poor trace layout as well as many other design choices that show up on different boards.

For testing we use both Everest and Sisoft's Sandra.

Everest

Stock Memory Performance

Under Everest we look at disk performance and despite using a different Southbridge the performance is equal across all three platforms.